Angered by her poor neighborhood's conditions and urged to do something about them, Soto became a foot soldier in the 1980s for Valley Interfaith, a group of community organizers anchored in the Roman Catholic parishes along the Texas border with Mexico. The 47-year-old widowed mother of seven credits the group with helping to pull her family out of the South Texas dirt and putting her children on successful paths.

"There was nothing here, nothing but weeds and cactus," Soto said of her two-street neighborhood, called a colonia, a few miles from the border. "In the beginning, no one wanted to help. We made a lot of noise."

The roots of Valley Interfaith — and sister organizations in San Antonio, Houston and other southwestern cities — lie in the streets of neighborhoods like Soto's. Spawned under the tutelage of the left-leaning Industrial Areas Foundation, the group's community organizers first targeted the lack of drinking water and other services in the colonias. Today, with conditions improved in many neighborhoods, the organizers have turned their focus on other aspects of life in poor communities — health care, education, job training.

Valley Interfaith's leaders now also seem more inclined to persuasion than the noisy protests that were used to improve the living conditions of the borderland's poor neighborhoods. They work with both Republican and Democratic politicians and are funded by grants and dollars from local, state and federal agencies.

"Once you acquire power, you go from protest to doing politics," said Elizabeth Valdez, Interfaith's lead organizer who began working with the group 23 years ago. "For us, the important thing is to build relationships with whoever is elected. Now we're at the table."

Most American citizens

But things were far different a half-century ago. The colonias problem surged when poor families — many of them immigrants from Mexico — bought inexpensive lots from developers who turned flood-plain land into housing developments.

Most of the lots were sold as is, with no water lines, sewers or other services, and were paid off in installments.

A census has identified some 2,300 colonias statewide — home to at least 400,000 people — mostly in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Officials say at least two thirds of colonia residents today are American-born citizens.

Valley Interfaith pushed Soto and her neighbors to demand that sewers get laid, streets paved, clean water tapped. They thronged city and county commission meetings.

Interfaith leaders wooed reporters from the Texas and national media, who wrote compelling stories about America's Third World. Busloads of Interfaith supporters traveled to Austin to protest against state officials.

It was an angry, aggressive and aggravating offensive. And it worked.

Throughout the 1990s and into this decade, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local funds have gone into the more than 1,000 colonias across Texas.

Regulations were written to require water and other services for new developments. Lawsuits were filed against developers who avoided the laws.

What were once some of the United States' most fetid communities slowly transformed into neighborhoods of tax-paying, utility-buying citizens. Today, while a few colonias still lack access to municipal water, most have it. Streets are paved, sewers installed.

"We wanted decent housing for people who wanted to live here and worked hard," Cortez said at Valley Interfaith's recent 25th anniversary convention in McAllen. "The colonias battle has been won."

Soto and her husband bought their 50-by-100-foot lot in the early 1980s in the fields south of Donna. The lot had electricity but no running water or sewer hookup. The street was dirt, which turned to mud with even slight rains.

Starting out small

As minimum-wage field hands who migrated north with the harvest and returned home to the border each winter, the $230 monthly payment for the property was all the couple could afford.

Soto and her husband threw up a small wooden house and began improving it little by little. Over the years, off-white bricks replaced the wood exterior. The weeds and cactus gave way to a trim lawn, fruit trees and flowering shrubs.

Many of the trailers and shacks in neighboring lots have given way to solid houses as well. The streets were paved two years ago, Soto says, and sewer lines installed. Everyone has running water.

Things are better. But they're still not easy. Like many colonias, Soto's neighborhood still floods with the tropical downpours, such as those from summer's Hurricane Dolly.

After her husband died in an accident, Soto pushed her children to get ahead. Her eldest son now works for an oil company, a daughter studies computer science on a scholarship at Texas A&M University. The younger children are all in school, expected to press on.

Soto works mornings caring for the elderly and a long shift each night packing vegetables harvested in the nearby fields, earning $6.50 an hour.

With the borderland's population continuing to explode, new rural neighborhoods keep popping up. One street over from Soto's house, trailers and shanties have bloomed in La Pinata, a 2-year-old neighborhood carved from the fields.

The streets are paved, but a heavy rain floods La Pinata waist-deep.

Mexico native Antonio Aleman, 44, who works part time in an auto body shop, put $600 down and will pay $190 a month for a decade to buy his lot. He shares a tiny, rusting trailer with his wife and U.S.-born teenage son.

But it won't always be this way, Aleman said, pointing to a prefabricated $5,000 shell of a house next door that he hopes to match with one of his own.

"We're just starting out," he said. "Things are good here. Much better than across the border."